Unraveling COVID-19 Origins

Francis is a physician and geneticist whose work has led to the discovery of the cause of cystic fibrosis, among other diseases. In 1993 he was appointed director of the Human Genome Project, which successfully sequenced all three billion letters of our DNA. He went on to serve three presidents as the director of the National Institutes of Health. The author of many books, including The Language of God, his latest is The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust.

Our conversation was entirely agreeable until we talked about trust, and his own handling of the Covid epidemic. I asked him in depth about the lab-leak theory and why he and Tony Fauci passionately dismissed it from the get-go, even as it now appears to be the likeliest source of the terrible virus. Things got intense.

For two clips of our convo — intense debate on the “Proximal Origin” paper outright denying a lab leak as the source of Covid-19, and Francis finding God after decades of atheism — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up on a rustic farm in Shenandoah; his parents creating a community theater; homeschooled until 6th grade; his amazing scientific accomplishments as a young adult; his scientism; his terminally ill Christian patients; the AIDS crisis; C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity; the First Mover question; Ross Douthat and “fine-tuning”; the multiverse; the limits to the materialist view; deism; cradle believers vs converts; evolution and sacrificial altruism; Socrates; Jesus dying for our sins; the doubting Thomas; how angels manifest; Francis Bacon; Richard Dawkins; being the NIH director during Covid; trust and mistrust in science; the early confusion in pandemics; tribalism; dismal safety standards at the Wuhan lab; gain-of-function; EcoHealth and Peter Daszak; intel agencies on lab leak; furin cleavage sites; Kristian Andersen; geopolitical fears over Trump and China; the opacity of the CCP; the Great Barrington Declaration; Trump threatening science funding at the Ivies; In Covid’s Wake; and if Francis has any regrets after Covid.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Claire Lehmann on the woke right, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee on Covid’s political fallout, Byron York on Trump 2.0, Robert Merry on President McKinley, Sam Tanenhaus on Bill Buckley, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on the Biden years, and Paul Elie on his book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.